With over 15 billion batteries from your laptops, phones, appliances, and more going to waste every year, which further advances the problems we are already facing with waste management and keeping landfills safe. While most people carry wrong or incorrect beliefs about battery recycling, such as that the batteries are empty and won't cause any harm when disposed of like normal trash, the need for awareness about this segment of e-waste is rising, too. Because batteries are disposed of on such a large scale, from every household, office, or industry, we also need to understand how we can take small steps to minimize the damage caused to the planet.

We therefore now proceed to know what is meant by recycling batteries, how you can help in doing so, and the level of good it brings to the whole world as we unravel those myths that surround it as we do so.

What Is Meant By Battery Recycling?

The process of battery recycling can be summed up as the recycling of used batteries that are gathered into the extraction of the valuable but harmful to the environment materials found on them, which include lead, mercury, cadmium, lithium, among others. These materials are the total cause of pollution of the landfills, soil, and water, should they come in contact with them, because these materials are heavy and toxic to the ecosystems and are therefore not supposed to be disposed of in the normal manner.

The process of recycling of commercial battery disposal is carried out in four major steps that involve collecting the batteries and sorting them, depending on their type and material, then they are dismantled and shredded into smaller and easily separable pieces, after which they are separated using techniques like melting, using chemical solutions, and regular separation of their different components including plastics, steel, and other valuable constituents. Lastly, the recovered materials are purified till they re-attain their standard of purity and functionality before they are supplied back to the manufacturers to reuse the materials in the production of new products and commodities.

Battery Recycling Myths: Debunked

A thorough dive we shall now make into the popular myths of battery recycling, whence they grow, and how they are refuted, on the basis of research and scientific evidence. Thus, the myths about recycling batteries span from the quality of recycled materials, the size of small batteries being impossible to recycle, among many others too as listed below:

Myth 1: All batteries go to landfills at the end.

The root of this myth is the fact that people think it is all right to put the batteries into a regular dustbin, among other trash, since it is all in a landfill anyway. The reason and thinking behind this belief is a lack of proper methods and infrastructure in the past, a perception of landfills being a sustainable waste management technique, along with the habits of people not working hard enough to change.

Busted: In certain countries and states, it is illegal for residents to dump batteries containing heavy metals in landfills because of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes. According to these schemes, manufacturers and sellers are required to handle end-of-life batteries to dispose of them in a registered recycling facility.

Myth 2: Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries cannot be recycled.

Initially, at the beginning of EVs' adoption, there was no transparency, process, or system for the used batteries. This led to people believing that EV batteries create a waste problem due to their size and complexity, rather than solving the purpose they were made for, which is being environmentally friendly.

Busted: As per the recent recycling news, EV batteries are fully recyclable, with this industry now expanding to make them even more eco-friendly, using advanced technologies. Processes such as hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy are adopted to extract more than 95 percent of the valuable materials used in the creation of every EV battery.

Myth 3: Battery recycling causes more harm to the planet than manufacturing new ones.

The popular opinion holds that recycling is much worse in terms of energy used and waste products compared to the one produced by simply discharging used batteries and developing new ones. This comes from the common viewpoint that recycling is a long and tedious task, which involves a lot of time and energy to just segregate and repurpose usable materials from waste.

Busted: Recycling sure consumes energy, but as most recycling tips and tricks already mention, the impact it delivers on the environment matters more than the time taken by the process. With fewer microplastics and heavy metals polluting and impoverishing the soil, we can also minimize the amount of land dedicated to landfills, while making use of what we can extract from the waste. 

Working Towards Greener Power Sources With Battery Recycling

Understanding what battery recycling is will help you gain clarity on why exactly it matters so much, because without it, it is very much possible for landfills to take up a lot more area than they already do. But as we begin to step out of the older and irrelevant beliefs about recycling batteries, we start grasping why it is so important to contribute to the movement, because this planet, we have inherited it from our ancestors, and owe it to the coming generations.